There’s a small startup backed by Jeff Bezos that thinks you don’t need a $70,000 electric truck to enjoy the outdoors. Slate Auto, a company that came out of stealth in April 2025, is building a tiny, stripped-down electric pickup that strips away all the bells and whistles. The result? A truly affordable EV truck with a price tag that sits in the mid-$20,000 range. And over 150,000 people have already put down a deposit to get one.
- The Slate Truck uses a single rear-mounted motor producing 201 horsepower and 195 pound-feet of torque.
- Two battery sizes are available: a 52.7 kWh battery providing an estimated 150 miles of range, and an 84.3 kWh battery with an estimated 240 miles of range.
- The startup made quite a stir when it debuted its two-door truck, and it has racked up at least 150,000 refundable preorders to date.
A Blank Canvas on Wheels
The Slate, an electric pickup truck from a California-based startup, emerged with a simple premise: what if an EV didn’t have to cost as much as a graduate degree? The company is betting on a market of people who want something different that they can make their own without the six-figure price tag. If you’ve been watching the EV truck race unfold, you’ve probably noticed a trend. A Tesla Cybertruck starts at $80,000. The now-dead Ford F-150 Lightning had a starting price of around $57,000, while the Rivian R1T kicks off from $75,000. The Slate goes in the opposite direction entirely.
There are no power windows, no infotainment screen, no speakers, and even the composite body panels are unpainted. That sounds awful on paper, right? But that’s exactly the point. According to the company, this means production costs can be kept at a minimum because there’s just one configuration that needs to roll off the assembly line. The base model, called the “Blank Slate,” arrives as a two-seat, two-door pickup with crank windows and steel wheels. If you want more, you add it yourself, or pay someone to do it.
Like Volkswagen Beetle owners who modified their cars in the ’60s and ’70s, turning them into everything from open-air dune buggies to fake Rolls-Royces, Slate showed off a bunch of creative configurations for its pickup truck. You can turn it into a five-seat SUV with a flat-pack kit, wrap it in wild colors, add speakers, and bolt on roof racks. While the truck world is full of big, kitted-out options like Black Widow trucks and other large custom rigs, the Slate finds its appeal in the opposite approach: starting simple and building up on your terms.
What’s Under the Hood (and How Far It Goes)
Powered by a single 150-kW motor, the Truck is offered with only rear-wheel drive and puts out 201 horsepower and 195 pound-feet of torque. That won’t pin you to the seat, but a zero-to-60-mph time of eight seconds is encouraging, though the Truck’s top speed is limited to 90 mph.
Two battery options are on the table. The standard 52.7 kWh pack gives you an estimated 150 miles of range, while the 84.3 kWh battery bumps that up to about 240 miles. This is a vehicle designed to get you to the trail, not necessarily up the sheer vertical face of it. For daily commutes and weekend campsite runs, that range should work for most people.
Charging is pretty reasonable too. The 52.7 kWh battery should fill from 20 to 100% on a Level 1 AC wall outlet in 11 hours. Upgrading to a Level 2 AC charger drops the time to five hours, and a Level 3 DC fast charger fills the standard battery from 20 to 80% in less than 30 minutes.
Size, Smarts, and Safety
This is a small truck, and that’s intentional. It’s a two-door, two-seater that’s just under 70 inches tall and just over 174 inches long, about as long as a Mini Countryman and as tall as a Ford Maverick. The bed is 5 feet long and 42.9 inches wide between the wheel wells. There’s a 7-cubic-foot frunk for enclosed storage under the hood.
Despite its small footprint, Slate took safety seriously. Slate said that its truck was designed to achieve a five-star US NCAP crash rating, thanks to standard features like traction control, electronic stability control, forward collision warning, and at least four airbags. If you add rear seats, the roll cage accessory includes integrated airbags and sensors that prevent the vehicle from operating unless everything is correctly installed.
In October 2025, Slate Auto announced a partnership with RepairPal, a network of certified auto repair shops across the U.S., to give owners access to 4,000 service points from day one. That’s a smart move for a startup with no dealership network.
Can a Tiny EV Truck Actually Succeed?
The reservation numbers look promising. The startup has racked up at least 150,000 refundable preorders to date. A reservation required just a $50 deposit. Whether all those turn into actual sales once pricing goes official in June 2026 is the big question.
As of January 2026, Slate is still expecting to begin initial truck deliveries to customers by the end of the year. Production is tentatively set to begin in 2026 at the company’s Warsaw, Indiana plant.
The skeptics have a point. The sale of two-door regular cab pickup trucks like Slate’s debut vehicle only accounted for less than 90,400 registrations in 2024, compared to over 2.5 million registered four-door crew cab trucks. And a handful of auto startups such as Lordstown Motors, Fisker, Canoo, and Nikola all made it into various forms of production but went bankrupt. Even better capitalized EV startups such as Rivian and Lucid have continually had to raise capital to stay afloat.
Still, the Slate has something those startups didn’t: a genuinely low price point and a product that people seem to understand on sight. Jay Leno drove the Slate Truck on Jay Leno’s Garage in February 2026. If Slate can actually build these trucks at scale and keep prices where they’ve promised, it could fill a gap in the market that nobody else is targeting. It won’t be for everyone, but for the buyer who wants a simple, capable, and affordable electric pickup, the Slate is the most interesting thing happening in trucks right now.
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Lucas Foster